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This new Anglican imperial paradigm was also framed in the colonies, where it was adopted at different speeds in different colonies. In Australia, between the 1820s and 1840s, the old church-state paradigm only gradually and reluctantly gave way to the new episcopal autonomous one under Bishop William Broughton. In New Zealand, it was the driving force of the state, of the episcopate of Bishop George Selwyn, from the 1840s. In both colonies, Anglican missionaries and bishops continued to construct identities for colonizers and the Aborigines and Maori indigenous peoples in ways similar to the 18th century Anglican missions.

Joseph Erlanger becomes the first head of the Physiology Department at Washington University, St Louis, and appoints Herbert Gasser to his staff. Together they attempt to record nerve impulses, after valve amplification, with a cathode ray tube, and eventually succeed. Several deflections are seen in the nerve responses to electrical stimulation and these are assumed to represent activity in groups of fibres with different functions. They find that the form of the nerve response (compound action potential) can be reconstructed if the numbers and diameters of the fibres are known. George Bishop, who is a colleague in this early work, is banished from the department for publishing a report on the C (unmyelinated) fibres without consulting Erlanger. Meanwhile Gasser, having been appointed head of the Pharmacology Department, leaves for a tour of European centres and later bccomes Director of the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Bishop and Erlanger continue their separate ways in St Louis.

The later lives of the main neurophysiologists in the latter part of the impulse story are described. Edgar Adrian, awarded a baronetcy, abandons research after his laboratory is accidentally flooded. Bryan Matthews succeeds him as head of the physiology department at Cambridge. After retiring from the directorship of the Rockefeller Institute, Herbert Gasser resumes experimenting and does important work on the unmyelinated nerve fibres. George Bishop continues various research studies into his eighties. Feldberg becomes head of the physiology and pharmacology division at the National Institute of Medical Research in London. Kenneth Cole remains resentful that his contribution to Alan Hodgkin’s work was never acknowledged. Hodgkin becomes President of the Royal Society and then Master of Trinity College, as does Andrew Huxley a little later. Eccles retires from Canberra and establishes a laboratory in Chicago, and then in Buffalo. Bernard Katz continues at University College London and Stephen Kuffler dies prematurely from a heart attack